In a tiny, softly lit room, a capacity audience of no more than a couple dozen spiritedly anticipated the poets’ presentation—particularly the readings of Ellen Kort, Wisconsin’s first poet laureate.

Matthew Wisniewski/Curb
Click image to view photo gallery.

Kort, a soft-spoken teacher, writer and poet whose calm disposition radiates confidence, was honored with the exclusive title in 2000 by then-Governor Tommy Thompson. With her cropped brunette hair and prescription glasses resting just below the bridge of her nose, the poet laureate looked the part of a stereotypical Midwestern grandmother as she sat at the head table facing the small audience packed inside the Wisconsin Historical Museum.

As part of the Wisconsin Book Festival, Kort, along with three other commended Wisconsin poets, regaled those in attendance with inspiring stories, life experiences and, most importantly, readings of award-winning poetry. Kort’s poetry spoke of farms and family. It spoke of Wisconsin women, their struggles and healing. It spoke of rivers and bears and the Fox Valley and the earth. Her poetry spoke of Wisconsin.

“I’ve traveled to a lot of different places, including New Zealand, which I’m very fond of,” Kort said when asked about her poetry’s obvious emotional connection to Wisconsin. “But I don’t know if I could ever leave, and that’s shown in my writing about the land and my experiences here.”

Kort’s work largely reflects a concept known as “sense of place.” A sense of place, as aptly described in "Saving America’s Countryside: A Guide to Rural Conservation," are “those things that add up to a feeling that a community is a special place, distinct from anywhere else.” But not everywhere in the country has this distinctiveness. Quickly growing areas with lots of new people surrounded by subdivisions, strip malls, cookie-cutter houses and chain stores with corporate sponsorship around every corner lack the quality of being somewhere special, somewhere unique. If someone were to be blindly transported to such a place, he or she would be hard pressed to name their location—they could be in Florida or Nevada or California or wherever. But to Kort and many other writers, Wisconsin has an intangible uniqueness, one that lives and breathes in the landscape and the people of the state. It is this that drives Kort and affects what and how she writes. She is not alone.

In the work of the countless writers, poets and playwrights throughout the state, a pattern seems to emerge: Wisconsin’s literary figures regularly publish pieces that reflect their experiences and environment living in this state. The words they write are affected by Wisconsin.

And many of the pieces they produce reflect their time spent in the Badger State. As a result, experiencing Wisconsin—its beauty, its farms, its Northwoods, it cheese, its winters, its people, its lakes and rivers and fishing and hunting—can be accomplished in one’s own home by experiencing Wisconsin writers, both past and present.